Cannot update crontab PATH variable via PAM

[Peter Matulis]

Binary package hint: cron

In Lucid I cannot update the PATH variable via PAM using:

~/.pam_environment
/etc/security/pam_env.conf

Seems that cron supports the pam_env module but leaves out the capacity to alter PATH. Can we please pull in this feature? Also, only the Maverick crontab man page refers to this stuff:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man5/crontab.5.html
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man5/crontab.5.html

[Christian Kastner (ckk)]

ad PATH: This is by design, therefore it won't change. For example, by pulling in PATH from pam_env, the ability to specify different paths for different crontabs would be lost.

I'm speaking as one of the Debian maintainers here - Ubuntu is of course free to add a patch on top of our version. I'd advise against it, not only for the reason above, but also because most (could be all, haven't checked recently) versions of cron I'm aware of do it this way.

ad crontab(5): the manpage you linked to comes from bcron, not vixie-cron. However, using the manpage search thingy, I couldn't find the correct one either...

[Christian Kastner (ckk)]

Addendum (hit submit too fast) : by "most versions', I meant not only the Debian/Ubuntu versions, but also those present in BSD, Red Hat, Suse etc. And the misdirected manpage (bcron) is the one in Lucid.